In-RIP Trapping

As all printers know, it is difficult to achieve and maintain perfect registration in a job. In jobs where colors do not touch one another, a certain amount of misregistration will go unnoticed. In jobs where colors do touch each other, misregistration can cause visible and unsightly gaps. In jobs where colors touch one another, trapping is often used to make misregistration less visible. Trapping involves creating a region of overlap between two adjacent colors, so that even if the colors are out of register, no gap is visible.

In the illustration below you can see how trapping helps this problem.

Many graphics applications offer a variety of methods of performing trapping. Applications may also offer an option to automatically perform trapping, either on selected objects or on the entire document, as it is printed. Both of these methods of trapping can be very effective, although virtually all graphics applications are limited to trapping native elements (elements which were generated within the application). They cannot trap placed elements, and they often cannot trap native elements to placed elements in an intelligent manner.

In-RIP Trapping is not limited in what it can trap: any element(s) on a page, regardless of their origin, can be trapped with other elements. This is mainly because In-RIP Trapping’s trapping decisions are made on the basis of ink characteristics. In general, lighter colors are trapped to darker colors. The characteristic used to measure “lightness” is Neutral Density. For that reason, In-RIP Trapping is a more generalized trapping solution than application-based trapping.